


Tedium

by ckret2



Series: Zer0 backstory one-shots [2]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mordecai is there for like five minutes, Pre-Canon, Zer0's pronouns switch based on what the viewpoint character assumes they are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-24 02:04:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18561733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Blue Collar said he called him "Seventeen" because of his little speech quirk, expressing himself in exactly seventeen syllables at a time. But the other reason was that Blue Collar had the deeply uncomfortable sense that the spindly amateur killer in front of him was just some kid, around seventeen years old, in deep over his head without even understanding how fast he was sinking."Don't know about other planets, but that's how hitmen work around here: we don't interfere with each other, wedon'thunt each other, but we don't help each other, either. It's a lonely profession. I don't want it to be lonely for you."





	Tedium

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second fic I've written about Zer0's backstory so I guess it's a series now.

"Don't listen to anyone who tries to hype up Dahl. They're amateurs who like to think carrying a gun with camo on it makes them a soldier instead of a thug. A _real_  professional hitman uses Tediore." Waving his hot sauce-coated chopsticks at Seventeen as he spoke, Blue Collar leaned across the sticky fast food restaurant table, warming up to the topic. "Quietest guns on the market. Easy to make impossible to trace. Break the gun's digistruct chip and toss your pistol in a trash can and boom, the murder weapon no longer exists. There's a hundred places on the ECHOnet that'll teach you how to corrupt a Tediore gun's serial number so it isn't printed on the bullets, in case you're worried the cops'll use it to track down the gun's registered owner—which probably won't be you anyway, since they're a dime a dozen to get second-hand. If you _really_  wanna go incognito, get a five-dollar digistruct chip from the nearest corner store and pirate a Tediore gun. You can even download some with Maliwan barrels if you wanna shock a shield off someone."

Seventeen shifted on the cheap vinyl seat, as if to speak, and Blue Collar lifted a hand placatingly. "I know, you're not a fan of Maliwan, I'm just saying. Now, the only exception to Tediore is rifles. _That's_  when you wanna go Dahl."

Seventeen snorted derisively. "For _sniper_ rifles? That's a waste of good ammo. One bullet, one death."

Sarcastically, Blue Collar asked, "Oh, and I suppose you get a lot of jobs that pay so bad you can't afford to buy four bullets?"

"Yeah."

Blue Collar had no idea if that was supposed to be a joke, but he went for it like it was serious. "Then you're taking the wrong jobs. No wonder you're so scrawny." He jabbed a meaty finger in the direction of Seventeen's chest. Seventeen swirled a straw in a cup of bubble tea in feigned indifference.

"What you call a 'waste of ammo,' a smart killer calls 'double tapping to be sure.' There's a reason a snake has two fangs. You know how many stories there are about freak cases of people surviving a bullet through the heart? There's a lot less about people surviving _two_  bullets." Blue Collar sat back, scooped up some fried rice, and talked through the mouthful. "Your pride at taking some sap out with one bullet isn't half as important as the _assurance_  that he's dead. That's what being a _professional_  is about. You double tap; you hit 'em while they're unaware; and you don't waste a second between kills. Dahl for rifles, and Tediore for everything else."

"But I like Jakobs," Seventeen protested. "I like the way firing feels—"

"That's called ' _recoil_ ' and it's a con, not a pro."

Seventeen flicked a balled-up straw wrapper at Blue Collar. "— _and_  I like headshots." Hands pressed to masked head, then expanding outward, pantomiming a brain exploding from a smashed skull: " _Pshoooo_."

Blue Collar shook his head, equal parts exasperated and charmed. "Yeah, yeah. I know you do. Damn."

They were an odd pair, sitting together with a couple plates of fried rice and egg rolls between them. Blue Collar was a grizzled, heavyset man, dressed like he could be anything from a factory worker to a mechanic to a janitor, depending on what tool belt he slapped on; hence his professional name. He dressed to blend in with a crowd, hid his gun in a tool bag slung over a shoulder or in a pocket if the pistol was small enough, and was never noticed.

Seventeen didn't blend in. Gangly, spindly; perpetually dressed in all black; combat boots and gloves; ski mask and goggles with reflective red lenses. If Blue Collar had said it once, he'd said it a hundred times: stealth wasn't about dressing like some kinda wannabe urban ninja. It was about dressing like the most uninteresting person on the street. His advice went in one ear and out the other—assuming Seventeen had ears.

What Seventeen _didn't_  have was an identity. Never offered a name, not even a professional name—never so much as offered a _gender_ , although Seventeen used a voice modulator set to such a hilariously low pitch that Blue Collar couldn't help but read it as cartoonishly masculine. Calling Seventeen a "he" was only an educated guess, although a guess that Seventeen himself didn't dispute; just like he didn't dispute when Blue Collar started calling him "Seventeen," just to have _something_  to call him.

Blue Collar told Seventeen that it was because of his little speech quirk, expressing himself in exactly seventeen syllables at a time. That was part of the reason, sure.

The rest of it was that Blue Collar had the deeply uncomfortable sense that the spindly amateur killer in front of him—sticking the straw of his bubble tea under a bandana around his face and noisily slurping up the boba left at the bottom—was just some kid, around seventeen years old, in deep over his head without even understanding how fast he was sinking.

He rarely had more than thirty bucks at any given time—and Blue Collar _knew_  he wasn't squirreling away savings anywhere. He slept on couches, benches, and homeless shelters, where anyone trying to track him down after a job would easily be able to identify the tall scrawny kid covered head to toe in black and kill him in his sleep. He didn't know how to market himself, how to make his name known—didn't _have_  a name to make known—didn't know how to make one successful job lead to another, better one. He wasn't building a career, just doing one lousy bloody job after another. Sometimes, Blue Collar saw him wobbling on his feet, like a skyscraper swaying in an earthquake, unsteady with hunger.

And still—still—he talked about challenging, interesting, fun kills; about how burst fire made things "too easy"; about how he thought, if he was missing half of his shots at 200 meters, then he should be trying to shoot from 200 meters more often, not moving to 100 meters where he knew he could hit the target. He was still a cocky kid who didn't get it. Wetwork wasn't about being cool, about making the most impressive trick shots: it was about paying the bills and buying the groceries.

Blue Collar really got the feeling that Seventeen thought, if he got deep enough into the bloody underworld of assassins, normal people problems like taxes and hunger would just disappear.

" _What?_ " Seventeen said, defensively.

Blue Collar looked down at his food, and scooped up a final decent mouthful of fried rice. He'd been staring at the kid, worriedly, a moment too long—trying to figure out if he'd put on any weight at all under that baggy windbreaker in the few months since Blue Collar had taken him under his wing. "Nothing. Just marveling at how you get that straw under your baby bib."

Seventeen huffed and tugged at his bandana self-consciously.

"Jakobs is fine," Blue Collar said, grudgingly. "And it's important that whatever guns you use feel natural to you. But they're a lot harder to work with. High recoil, low firing speed, incredibly noisy..."

"Kills in one shot."

"When you're lucky. And when you aren't, it's that much harder to get the second shot off." Seventeen moved as if to retort, and Blue Collar waved him off. "But if you're committed, you're committed. I get it—some guns feel right. Just know that it's gonna make some jobs harder than they have to be—and be ready to compensate for that."

"I like a challenge." Seventeen picked up an egg roll in one hand and used it to point. "You know I do, Blue Collar. I'm gonna be fine." He held the tip of his bandana out of the way with his free hand, and took a bite. 

Blue Collar shook his head. "Edgy little shit," he said affectionately. Seventeen flipped him off.

Blue Collar reached into one of his many pockets, tossed a few bucks on the table, and pulled out a pen. "Listen, I know you don't have your own ECHO unit." He smoothed out his discarded chopsticks wrapper and scribbled a frequency along the length of it. "But if anything happens to you, you find one, and you call me, all right?" He pushes the wrapper over. "This isn't normal in our line, I want you to know. Don't know about other planets, but that's how hitmen work around here: we don't interfere with each other, we _don't_ hunt each other, but we don't help each other, either. It's a lonely profession."

Seventeen picked up the wrapper and looked at it.

"I don't want it to be lonely for you."

Seventeen looked up at him.

"Listen." Blue Collar leaned forward, voice hushed, looking Seventeen in the goggles. "You're new at this. And I like you. I kinda see you like a..." He wrestled with whether "little brother" was fitting, decided "little sister" was straight out, and settled on "... a younger sibling, to me. I wanna help you out when I can." He smiled tiredly. "I'm not gonna be in this business much longer—might be nice to pass on what I know before I quit."

Seventeen looked down at the wrapper again. And then said, so quietly and low that his voice modulator almost distorted the words out of recognition, "Thank you."

###

It was about one in the morning when Blue Collar was stirred by his ECHO unit's buzzing. He groaned, slapped at his bedside table until he picked it up, and stared at it.

Unknown number, no name, just a one word text message:

« **Run.** »

He stared at it, tried and failed to recognize the number, then let his head drop back on his pillow.

Then bolted out of bed. You work in a dangerous business, somebody you don't know tells you to run, you _do it._ He had on his coveralls, a work boot, and a random tool belt before he even thought to wonder who'd messaged him.

It was probably Seventeen. Not many other people had his private frequency, and all of _them_ he knew the numbers of. (Didn't have them saved in his ECHO unit—didn't want somebody to get a hold of it and start hunting down the few people he liked—but he'd recognize the numbers by sight.) Seventeen was the only one who might call him from an unknown frequency.

Even though Blue Collar had given him the number in case of emergency, all these weeks he'd expected that if he got a call, it'd be because _Seventeen_ was the one in trouble. Not that he minded the head's up. He was gonna have to thank the kid, once he shook whatever was coming for him.

With a small Tediore pistol in one of his larger pockets and a Pangolin shield weighing heavily on his back, he climbed out the window onto the fire escape with a grunt of exertion and started climbing down.

It was raining heavily. Some high-end Pangolins could keep the rain out along with the bullets. Blue Collar could afford one, but hadn't wanted to make himself so conspicuous, with each raindrop bouncing off and illuminating the invisible shield in electric blue snowflake patterns, so he used a cheaper model. He was glad he had, now, with who-knew-who—police? a corporate assassin?—hunting him in the dark; but he was already soaked and cold by the time he reached the ground. One way, towards a main street, he could see huge sprays of water being kicked up in the lamplight by nighttime truckers. He went the other way, deeper into the darkness.

He felt like he was being followed. Was he, or was that just paranoia? How close was whatever he was supposed to be running from? He checked his ECHO unit, but there was no new info. Just Seventeen's warning. Damn, where was Seventeen? Was he okay?

He'd prepared his escape routes years ago, as soon as he'd moved into this apartment. It's harder to kill in a crowd; harder to find your target, harder to separate and eliminate them. A couple blocks away was a dance club, near it was a bus stop; if he could get into the club, he could stay there until it closed, then slip onto the three a.m. bus with the other tired clubbers going home. The bus would take him to a hub where he could grab a train heading out of town in a random direction.

The ATM near the club only let him take out $1500. That and the hundred bucks in his pocket would have to hold him; he didn't know how sophisticated the people after him were, whether they could track his spending or withdrawals. He'd be working in cash for a while.

There was a short line to get into the club, huddled up against the front wall for the meager shelter of the roof's slight overhang. Cargo trucks came down this street less often than the street in front of Blue Collar's apartment, but every time they did, a pair of kids in a miniskirt and skintight pleather jeans squealed as they were sprayed with water. Blue Collar just shuddered with cold. He kept his back to the club's front wall, squinting, looking for any odd shapes moving in the night shadows.

A thick door opened for the pair in front, and Blue Collar caught a few seconds of throbbing dubstep before it swung shut. Sounded like a remix of a lawnmower. He stepped up to the bouncer.

The bouncer was a massive muscled man dressed in the same mix of matte black and slick neon as the clubbers coming in, but his hair was thinning and he looked closer to Blue Collar's age than to the pleather-clad kids who went in before him. He looked Blue Collar's soggy work clothes up and down, clasped his hands together in front of his belt, and said, "I'm not sure this place is your scene, man."

"I just need a roof over my head for a few minutes," he said, smiling a well-practiced smile, like a mild-mannered salt-of-the-earth construction-and/or-factory worker. "It's pouring out here."

"There's a cover."

"I know, that's fine," Blue Collar said; and then, when the bouncer still looked skeptical, he lowered his voice. "Listen. I'm being followed. I just need to get out of the open."

The bouncer tipped his head up slightly in understanding; then unfolded one of his hands, palm up. Blue Collar shoved fifty dollars in. "I'll give you another if I get out of here alive." Just to head off anyone else trying to bribe the bouncer.

"No worries. It's my job to stop fights." He stuffed the money in one pocket and pushed open the door. "Come on in." His words were almost lost under the thudding bass.

Blue Collar paid his cover and wandered into the darkness and flashing colored lights. A few strobe lights pointed straight in his face, and he blinked hard, trying to clear the spots from his eyes so he could see in the club.

His dark brown coveralls and salt-and-pepper hair didn't exactly fit in with the crowd; but they didn't stand out across the room, either. The crowd was made up of rainbow neon hair—every hue from pitch black to lightning white. Dark clothes with colorful strips designed to reflect the lights and dazzle the eye. Flashing LED-like pictures blinked on and off in front of the faces and over the heads of the dancers, **:)** and **< 3** and **☆** and **愛** , in green and red and blue, courtesy of prosthetic optical implants or temporary body mods stickers that could be slapped on your forehead. Anyone who wasn't making an effort to stand out would blend into the shadows. Blue Collar waded onto the dance floor, found a narrow gap between a few clustered circles of dancers where he wouldn't get in their way but wouldn't visibly stand out as on his own, and grit his teeth against the garbage disposal roar of music as he tried to figure out what to do next.

It would help if he had the slightest idea what was after him. If it was somebody pissed over a kill, someone's grieving family, he might need to move a town over—or maybe only get a hotel out of town for a few days until the funeral was over. If somebody was getting paid to find him, though, they'd keep coming; he might need to get off planet. If only Seventeen had sent him more info...

One song ended, and the next began: something with a light drum machine and synthesized instruments and an artificially high-pitched singer, repetitive but much easier to think through. Dammit, Seventeen—that was a factor Blue Collar hadn't even considered. He was probably tangled up in this somehow—how had he found out there was something Blue Collar needed to run from? What if they'd taken him hostage? Or were trying to get info out of him? He couldn't leave town without making sure Seventeen was okay. How was he going to check Seventeen's usual haunts while avoiding being seen by anyone expecting him to do just that?

Blue Collar didn't consciously notice that the music sounded like it was building toward something, the singing halting and the drums speeding up, until suddenly it paused and the whole club seemed to hang in anticipation; and then the bass slammed down like a bomb dropping. Something whizzed through the air beside Blue Collar's temple. In front of him, he saw the back of a dancer's head explode, and the body pitched forward.

He'd automatically crouched down before he figured out what he'd seen. Shit! They were audacious, whoever they were. He turned, peering between backs and upper arms in search of anyone who stood out, looking up at the crowds at the bar and tables that circled the room a few steps higher than the dance floor. The bouncer wouldn't have let someone in who looked suspicious, right? Or maybe they'd offered the bouncer more than fifty bucks. Or maybe the bouncer was dead. The first screams started up behind Blue Collar, where the dancer had been shot. He zigzagged through the crowd, heading toward the front, unwilling to exit through a back door and risk getting trapped in a dead end, hoping he could escape ahead of the crowd and the hitman.

He wasn't the first out the door, but he was close. He glanced back as people trickled and then poured screaming out of the club, looking for anyone who stood out—fingering the pistol in his pocket as he did. Nothing but kids in black clothes and flashes of color. He backed away from the door, watching as he went, heading toward the safe shadows of another alleyway.

Blue Collar had scanned over the same figure in the crowd three times, before recognition hit him: he knew those reflective red goggles, and the ski mask around them, and the black windbreaker beneath. His heart leaped into his throat and his stomach dropped. Oh, please no. Not Seventeen.

He was looking at Blue Collar. He flipped up his windbreaker's hood against the rain, and stalked through the panicked crowd, unnoticed, toward Blue Collar.

Blue Collar turned and ran.

Hitmen don't hunt hitmen. Not on this planet, anyway—not unless they're in a corporation's pocket. Had Seventeen gotten a job with a big biz? Even now, running panting through the pouring rain, Blue Collar hoped for Seventeen that he had—corporate assassination was steady work, the kind that came with benefits and could carry you through to retirement if you weren't executed during a merger—but why would they send him after _Blue Collar_? He made a point to only take personal jobs, rarely political ones; he never messed with business. Why—?

A midnight trucker with a malfunctioning muffler roared past, thunderously loud; a bullet slammed into the back of his head, pounding on his shield. The shield spread the shock of the impact across his entire upper back, but it was enough to bring him to his knees, one hand landing just past the curb in wrist-deep water. He couldn't get up before a heavy combat boot kicked his back, knocking him to the ground as it ripped his shield off. The Pangolin clattered into the road.

"Disappointing."

Blue Collar rolled onto his back, huffing, and looked up at Seventeen. "What the hell are you doing?"

"My job." He pulled out a Jakobs revolver, a cheap thing with the faux wood paneling on the barrel already rubbing off the corners.

"Who?" Blue Collar demanded. "Who hired you, kid? How much?"

He jerked one shoulder in a shrug. "Somebody's cousin. Job you did a month ago. Couple hundred bucks?"

That was all Blue Collar's life was worth to Seventeen? He laughed wheezily. " _Damn_ , kid, you're never gonna make it big taking high-risk low-pay jobs like that. Lord..." He reached slowly into a pocket; Seventeen's aim jerked to follow his hand, but Blue Collar waved him off, grumbling, "You know that's my wallet pocket." Seventeen lowered the Jakobs, but only slightly. Blue Collar pulled out his wallet, pushed himself up with one hand, and held the wallet up to Seventeen. "Here. Damn. I've got fifteen hundred on me."

Seventeen made a disgusted noise. He'd set his dumb voice modulator so low it sounded like a dog growling. "I don't want money."

"No, I know you don't, but you need it." Seventeen didn't move. Blue Collar shook the wallet. "Take it even if you're gonna shoot me. What am I gonna do with it?"

Seventeen hesitated. Then crouched down, snatched the wallet angrily from Blue Collar, and stuffed it in his back pocket. "Moron."

Blue Collar sank back to the wet concrete, holding himself up with both elbows, fingers of one hand dragging in the water below the curb. "You don't wanna do this."

"I do," Seventeen said, sullenly.

"You don't. I know you don't. You wouldn't have sent me that text if you really wanted to finish the job," Blue Collar said. "You couldn't bring yourself to turn down the job but you couldn't bring yourself to do it clean and quick like you should." He smiled shakily. "Don't do something you're gonna regret. You want me to escape."

"I want a _challenge_." He snarled it so emphatically that he lurched forward with the word. "I wanted to make this hard! I wanted a hunt!"

Blue Collar's stomach dropped again, the way it had when he'd first seen Seventeen in the crowd. Suddenly, sinkingly, he felt like he'd deeply misunderstood his gaunt young protégé. "Wha—Why? Why?"

"Because you're a pro, you're supposed to be badass. You should be a threat!" Anguished, desperate, water flying off the barrel of his revolver as he waved it, vocal modulator fritzing with static, Seventeen cried, "I'm _bored_ , Blue Collar! Every job's so damn easy! I _need_  a challenge!"

Blue Collar had misjudged him. Seventeen wasn't out there making tricky one shot kills out of pride, taking high-risk jobs out of arrogance; he was a junkie. He had the skinniness of a guy who gave up on food in search of a fix; he was trembling, right now, in front of Blue Collar, like he was going into withdrawal without enough stimulation to get his adrenaline pumping.

No wonder all Blue Collar's talk of Tediore, talk of safe and stable and secure, had flown right over him. He didn't want any of that. He didn't want the money. He didn't want to make a living. He wanted all the jobs he could get.

Blue Collar could hear a truck approaching from behind him. Seventeen glanced at it, then held up the Jakobs again, pointed it at Blue Collar's head. Seventeen  _had_  taken his advice, about how damn loud those Jakobs guns were; he was using the noise around him to cover up his shots.

"I'm really sorry." Seventeen's eyes weren't on Blue Collar as he prepared to kill him. Blue Collar saw the reflection of the truck's headlights in his goggles. "This was supposed to be hard. You should've fought back."

A moment before the truck passed, Blue Collar swept his hand through the water beside the curb, sending a spray into Seventeen's face. Seventeen reeled back, sputtering and rubbing his goggles on one sleeve; Blue Collar kicked one of Seventeen's feet out from under him, knocking him sprawling headfirst in the street. Blue Collar rolled over, stood, and ran as the truck honked and swerved. He didn't stop to see whether it hit Seventeen.

He crossed the street, waved at another cargo truck coming his way, standing directly in its path; it slammed the breaks, but kept skidding in the rain, and Blue Collar had to dive to the sidewalk to avoid being hit. The driver banged the cab door open and circled around the truck. "The hell do you think you're doing?!" she bellowed. She was waving a knife, a four-inch glowing blue digistructed blade extending from a solid handle, that sizzled where the rain hit it.  "Middle of the night, pouring rain, I coulda—" Blue Collar pointed his Tediore at her before he'd even gotten to his feet. She stopped in the middle of the street. "Whoa—okay, buddy, look—I didn't mean to almost hit you, let's be..."

"Back in the truck," he said hoarsely. With some difficulty, he got to his feet. "I need a ride."

He didn't say another word except "Knife, down," until the truck was moving again, heading down the street and picking up speed. "I'm sorry about this, ma'am," he said tersely. "There's a guy back there trying to kill me. Didn't have time to call a cab."

Her gaze flicked to a side mirror, then back to Blue Collar's gun, then forward again. "Would this have to do with the truck that was stopped in the middle of the road back there?"

Blue Collar nodded grimly. "With any luck, he's under its tires." It stung his heart to say that.

She nodded. "Okay. I get it. I'm sympathetic to that." She glanced at Blue Collar. "Now that we're all on the same side—do you mind pointing that somewhere else?"

He hesitated. "You're not going to go for that knife?" Its handle was in a cup holder in the center console between their seats.

"I'm not stupid."

He lowered the gun to point at his footwell. "Yeah. All right." He flopped his head back against his seat, and sighed.

Something crashed into the truck from the driver's side. The trucker swore and swerved.

Blue Collar fell sideways over the cup holder. "What the _hell_ —" 

A second impact. Blue Collar braced one arm against the driver's seat, the other hand fumbled on the center console for something to grab onto, and he looked out her window. "Oh, my god." Slowly pulling level with them was another truck—with Seventeen crouched on the hood, one hand on the roof of the cab and the other pointing his revolver through the window. 

Blue Collar didn't have time to warn the trucker, didn't have time to do anything but gasp. The first bullet hit his shoulder, and the arm supporting him collapsed; two more shots, a pained scream; the truck veered off the road. When it crashed, Blue Collar's back slammed into the windshield, shattering it, and he tumbled down the hood to land on the ground. The rain poured on his face. He heard the other truck skid and crash a moment later.

He could hear Seventeen laugh—harsh, breathless, exhilarated.

Seventeen took his time coming to Blue Collar's side. When he was in view, Blue Collar could see why; he was limping, one arm wrapped tight around his chest, moving gingerly with pain. "Five shots on one job." He checked the ammo in his cylinder, then clicked it back in place. "Only one left for your head." He dropped uncoordinatedly to his knees and held the revolver to Blue Collar's forehead, apparently too unsteady to feel confident of making the shot from a distance. "Can one-fanged snakes kill?"

With a roar, Blue Collar lunged up, activated the trucker's digistruct knife, and slammed the blade through Seventeen's left goggle lens.

He didn't scream when he fell back. He just sucked in a breath, like he was shocked—maybe scared. Blue Collar hated the sound of it. Damn stupid, ungrateful, self-destructive kid. If Blue Collar had realized sooner what it was he was looking for, what desperation was gripping him—maybe he could've helped him out better, maybe they could have found a way to get him whatever it was he needed.

Voice tight with pain, Seventeen croaked, "Well-fought, badass." He raised his revolver one last time.

The Jakobs was the loudest thing Blue Collar had ever heard.

###

" _God_ , no, I don't actually _enjoy_  Maliwan snipers." Mordecai waved off the suggestion with one arm, briefly startling Talon off his perch on his shoulder. "Sorry." He waved at Talon, calling him back down, then settled back slouching in his rickety folding chair overlooking the rolling Highlands below. "I just like 'em for the utility. There's _nothing_  more satisfying than a headshot with a Jakobs—"

"Yes," Zer0 said emphatically, their back ramrod straight where they sat on the ground beside Mordecai. " _Exactly_."

"See, you get it!" Mordecai laughed. "But when you're working fast—and me, Lil, and Brick, sometimes we've _gotta_  work fast—most efficient thing to do is have a guy out of the line of fire to slag targets as fast as possible so the guys on the ground can pick them off. And the only guy in our group with that skill..." He pointed a thumb at himself. "Seen you hauling around some Maliwan rifles, too. Same reason?"

Zer0 sighed in frustratin, nodding. "Our skills are wasted," they said. "Anyone can slag and spray. One shot kills are art."

"Yeah?" Mordecai grinned crookedly. "You think so? Me, an artist, huh."

"Mm." Zer0 nodded, inordinately pleased to have gotten that smile out of the more experienced sniper.

They'd been told, years and years ago, that assassination was a lonely profession. Blue Collar had been right. Small interludes like this, when Zer0 could get out of their own head—break the monotonous cycle of long waits and unsatisfying jobs between the rare real thrill kills—were a blessing and a relief. Almost enough to keep them sane.

"Hey, we should hang more," Mordecai said, clapping a hand on Zer0's shoulder. Zer0 stiffened, but found they minded the uninvited contact much less than they expected to. "Don't get a lot of other good snipers around here—or even folks that appreciate _me_  as a sniper instead of just 'the support guy with the slag.' What do you think? I know some good spires in the Dust that let you see for miles around. We can pick off spiderants—I wanna see how far you can really shoot."

An LED red smiley flashed out of their prosthetic left eye. "Sounds fun."

Mordecai got to his feet, considered the folding chair, then decided either nobody would steal it or it wasn't worth preserving. "I'm heading back to Sanctuary. You coming?"

"Later," Zer0 said. "Gotta drive around."

###

Once every few days, when they didn't have enough to shoot and found themself walking along the roofs of Sanctuary on windy days just for the meager thrill of trying not to fall, Zer0 took their technical on a long circuit through Pandora, checking out every single bounty board they could find. They bounced over hard tundra roads and unevenly packed sandy highways so fast it physically hurt, using the speed to distract them from the itch for something to do.

They were bored, god they were bored. It was the kind of boredom that crushed you, suffocated you, like a heavy weight pinning down your chest while you writhed and clawed at the dirt trying to get out from under it. They could feel the boredom sucking on the inside of their chest, threatening to form a black hole in the pit of their abdomen. Their hands shook and their feet bounced, trying to shake off the boredom. It didn't abate. In their heart, Zer0 knew that this boredom was going to kill them someday.

They circled from one bounty board to the next, like a junkie looking for a dealer, looking for a fix to stave off the boredom. Anything, _anything_ —exterminate a skag den, deliver a package, go to a birthday party— _anything_. 

Finally, at the Happy Pig bounty board, Zer0 found an illuminated yellow sign. They pushed down the gas, although they were already going as fast as they could, and leaped out of the technical before it stopped rolling. It crashed into the motel room with the weird altar for human sacrifices. The cultists would have to set up a new firepit.

They flipped through the offered jobs—package delivery, package pickup, take down a local bandit—and then stopped. And they stared.

They felt cold.

« **Reward for anybody who brings down the cheating S.O.B. known as Mordecai. Originally from Artemis, last seen with a pack of vault-hunting bandits on Pandora...** »

They couldn't move. They re-read the bounty, hoping that the name would change.

It didn't.

They thought of shooting contests in the desert, of long debates about rifle features and sniping techniques, of how the hours melted by comfortably and steadily in friendly company. They thought of Mordecai's breathtakingly infallible aim. They thought of their modest home in Sanctuary—and of Sanctuary's defenses. They thought of the people they considered mutual friends—the powerful people, so very powerful, who would come to Mordecai's defense. They thought of what it would be like to lose those friends—they thought of what it would be like to gain them as opponents.

They thought about the boredom sucking them inside out.

They stared hard at the bounty, until the letters swam together and the reward was a string of digits.

Then they turned to look at Sanctuary.

###

**Author's Note:**

> Also on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/184373490672/tedium).


End file.
